Historians usually refer to these collective groups of unownable Africans as “maroons,”9 but the nomenclature varied by region. In Alabama and Georgia, they were called people who lived “in the woods,” but perhaps the most telling moniker for the self-emancipated Africans came from Virginia and Maryland, in that Great Dismal Swampland. Nicknamed the “outlands,” the region was too treacherous to travel through by horse or canoe. Virginians ultimately reappropriated an adjective to describe unconquerable residents of the unconquered lands, calling these freedom-inclined Boyz n the Hood
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